Hywel ap Madog's father, Madog ap Hywel, did not die peacefully at Penarth. He died fighting for the House of York during the Wars of the Roses, as a captain under his uncle Owain Tudor -- the same Owain Tudor whose grandson would become King Henry VII. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Eifionydd were characterised by violent feuds between families claiming descent from the twelfth-century prince Collwyn ap Tagno and those claiming descent from Owain Gwynedd, prince of Gwynedd. Madog's family belonged to the Collwyn line. He survived the feuds, only to die in the dynastic war that engulfed England. His son Hywel built the hall at Penarth that we still walk through today, and an elegy written for Hywel mentions sweet rumney wine kept at Penarth Fawr -- a small detail that conjures a candlelit hall, a fire in the open hearth, the cups of imported wine circulating in a society where most people drank ale.

The most important feature of the house is the spere. A spere is a full-height screen that divides the hall from the entrance passage, taking the form of two short side-walls with a wide opening between them. Only about twenty examples survive in Wales, almost all in the north-east. Penarth Fawr's is the most westerly known and the only one in the old county of Caernarfonshire. The spere posts are elaborately moulded with Perpendicular Gothic detail that continues across the truss above. Arch braces connect the truss to the uprights; the openings are cusped, the apex forming a quatrefoil. Two-thirds of the way along the medieval hall, the central bay's arch-braced collar beam carries similar carving. A small cusped truss just beyond originally supported a louvre over the hearth, allowing smoke from the open fire to escape -- one of very few surviving louvres in Wales. These are the details that medieval carpenters built to be admired by candlelight, and they still reward the same kind of attention five hundred years later.

By 1615 the open hearth had become old-fashioned, and Hugh Gwyn -- a descendant of Hywel ap Madog who served as High Sheriff of Caernarvonshire in 1599-1600 -- inserted a proper fireplace into the east wall. A carved stone panel above it bears his arms and the date. Gwyn or one of his successors also put a floor into the hall sometime in the seventeenth century, dividing what had been a single double-height space into two storeys. An ex situ ceiling beam in the hall is inscribed 'IWI 1656 FEB 20' -- possibly recording the marriage of John and Jane Wynne rather than the date of construction. The family extended the house into a U-shape, adding a north parlour wing and a south service wing. In 1662 Wynne was taxed for three hearths in the hearth tax assessment. The family moved to the nearby Madryn estate over the next century, Penarth Fawr declined to a tenanted farm, and the parlour wing and north end of the medieval hall were demolished.

In 1886 the house was bought by Owen Evans. Fifty years later, in 1936, his descendant William Evans undertook a significant restoration. Evans removed the seventeenth-century floor that had divided the medieval hall, took out other later accretions, and returned the principal space to approximately its fifteenth-century state. The roof timbers, including the spere truss, had survived underneath all the alterations. In 1949 Evans placed the hall in state care, and Cadw manages it today. The seventeenth-century east wing remains a private residence. Penarth Fawr is a Grade I listed building and a scheduled monument, free to enter and rarely crowded. A study of the house, Penarth Fawr: a history of a medieval hall-house, appeared in 2002. The hall is set on a minor road off the A497, south of Llanarmon, in a corner of Eifionydd where almost nothing of the fifteenth century should logically have survived. It did because the spere was too good to tear out, and because William Evans knew what he was looking at.